A rebound, but not a return to normal
After plummeting during the pandemic, international enrollments have been on the rise, notching the highest single-year growth in decades in the most recent “Open Doors” report.
But to call this gain in foreign students a rebound is a bit of a misnomer. That’s because there are major differences in the profile of international students in the United States, with Covid as a sort of demarcation line.
Before the pandemic, the typical visa-holding student was an undergraduate from China. Today, enrollment gains are being driven by Indian students seeking master’s degrees. In fact, when I dug into the numbers, I discovered that there now are more foreign graduate students in the United States than there were international undergraduates during the heyday of the China boom.
This new surge has been important not just for international admissions but for American graduate schools, which have been grappling with declining interest among domestic students. A third of the students in graduate-school classrooms are from abroad.
In a longer piece for The Chronicle, I examined the shifting trends in international enrollments and their implications for American colleges. (As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.)
Here are a few takeaways:
Middle-class aspirations and insufficient educational capacity at home are driving student mobility. In that sense, students coming from India (and to a lesser extent, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in South Asia) have similar motivations as their Chinese predecessors for seeking a foreign degree. Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, an assistant professor of educational studies, told me that many of his colleagues at Jawaharlal Nehru University plan to send their children abroad. When Choudhury did a fellowship at Harvard University last year, he took his 12-year-old son on a mini-college tour. “It’s the American dream, through the Indian eye,” he said.
But there are real differences, among them, how to pay for that degree. While Chinese students typically funded their education through family savings or property, most Indian students borrow. MPower Financing is a public-benefit corporation that makes loans to international students — nearly all at the master’s level — who are studying in the United States and Canada. Some 70 percent of its borrowers come from households with incomes under $12,000. As a result, students’ financial footing may be less stable.
High visa-refusal rates add to the uncertainty. As I’ve written before, students in India, and especially Africa, have a much higher likelihood of having their American visa applications denied than those in China, where nine out of 10 visas are approved. As a result, colleges cannot be sure that the students they accept will actually make it to campus.
Different students have different needs. Well, obviously, right? For starters, recruiting graduate students, who typically are in the work force, requires separate strategies from the more centralized, collegewide approach to enrolling foreign undergraduates.
The campus infrastructure built up for an earlier wave of international students may not be the right fit for current students, who demand different academic and cultural support. For example, Indian students who have studied in English don’t need preparatory language courses. Since they don’t live in dormitories, they’re not concerned about having familiar food in the dining halls.
On the other hand, as international students jumped from 42 percent of all graduate-school enrollments at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County in the 2019-20 academic year to 58 percent today, the university has had to add bus routes to serve foreign students living off campus without cars, said Janet C. Rutledge, vice provost and dean of the graduate school. Career-services offices could find themselves working overtime to help professionally minded students.
When return on investment is paramount, an American degree and work experience are a package deal. Optional Practical Training, the federal program that lets foreign graduates of American colleges stay in the country and work, has expanded, allowing STEM majors to get three years of on-the-job learning. Sai Sourab Ganti, an engineering-management student at UMBC, told me that a “U.S. degree plus three years of OPT, that will be of value” when he returns to India.
Despite OPT, many American employers balk at hiring applicants on visas, and layoffs have recently hit the tech sector, which attracts many overseas students. The aberrations to high job-placement rates for graduates of the University of Washington’s business school are “almost without exception” international students, said Frank Hodge, the school’s dean.
An additional wild card is this fall’s presidential election. Former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee, is a critic of OPT, and there are concerns he could restrict, or even gut, the program if he returns to office.
